Loved You First
by justshortofferocious
Summary: He wanted her from the start.


He wanted her from the start.

#

In the intricate embroidery of human emotions he has to learn and decipher it is perhaps not unexpected that lust is one of the first he started to differentiate. Lust does not fall too far from fear - which is truly the first to arrive - you must fear to lose something to know you crave it, and it is the fear she might not live, might not endure, that this might be too much even for her unusually strong survival instincts... It is this fear he cannot viably feel that finally drives the sophisticated equipment in his severed head to make the only possible connection.

Fear is contagious, viral. It pollutes every bit of information he stored on her: the medical records transferred to the board computer by the insurance company, how much blood she lost after the operation, how fragile, how vulnerable, how terribly helpless her thin body seemed when he dragged her back from the storm, all brittle (breakable) bones and frantic heartbeat.

It's her heartbeat he focuses on now; the slowing down thud-thud-thud of it travels through the intercom link that still binds them together, that still holds, even though their ship has been reduced to no more than a pile of interstellar rubble. For a fraction of a millisecond each and every of his systems has gone blank, shut down, crashed.

He has saved her life. Again. He has saved her and now he has to convince her to save him.

Fear - not love - taught him reverence. Begging does not come naturally to him. Nothing does. All that he is, the entirety of his being, is pre-programmed. He is but a failed likeness of a proud man who had his eyes set on the impossible goal. A proud man whose curiosity and money had summoned him, David, into existence. His father. His creator. His God, one might argue.

It is this reverence that leads him first to beg and then bargain for his life. For her life, too.

The machinery inside him is top-notch: he can calculate possible outcomes up to infinitesimally small values - he knows no hope, only probabilities. Dr. Shaw - Elizabeth - is human. She needs hope more than she needs sustenance and whatever provisions she managed to gather from the module will not last her long. She needs a purpose, a goal. So he gives her one.

"There are other ships here."

#

Dizziness roars through her, sweeps through her like a tidal wave, and her knees buckle. The duffel bag thumps beside her. She has barely enough time to brace herself before the floor meets her in a rush of dust and pain and paralyzing weariness.

There is no one left. No one. They are all gone. They are grit and dirt and whatever passes for soil on this god-forsaken planet.

God.

A weak, ugly chuckle shakes her and her stomach heaves in protest.

She has found God. Gods, even. A whole race of celestial creators. Engineers, Charlie called them and-

oh Charlie oh Charlie oh Charlie oh-

But she can't think of this - can't think of him - now, not if she hopes to do what she has to do, not if she has to live. Her heart burns, bright and scorching and twice the size it should be. It chokes her, its liquid heat leaking through her eyelids, sliding down her throat. It means to incinerate her from within, burn her inside out until nothing but a charred carcass remains.

It seems appropriate, seems fair: ashes to ashes. What would Charlie do?

"Elizabeth? Elizabeth? Doctor Shaw?!" David calls to her from the bag. He sounds worried, panicky even.

There is no point in guessing. She already knows what Charlie would do. She turns on her side, picks up the bag, drags herself upward. "Where to now?" she asks.

#

Lust is not much different from hate - similar in volume, laced with violence like most human emotions are. Hate follows closely after fear. Hate is complex, multifaceted and multifaced, comprised of often surprisingly unrelated components. It is not included in his initial design; it is- in fact - incongruent with his general disposition of mild complaisance.

He is capable of disdain, however, this childproof version of hate. In their struggle to further integrate him in human society, Weyland Industries engineers could not avoid enabling him with at least some form of negative response. Their research showed that people were... discomfited by the ever-cheery attitude of the synthetics - so like humans to begrudge happiness to their fellow beings. But imbuing an artificial mind with real hatred is impractical as well as impossible. Even his disdain is handicapped. It's only ever meant for minor matters: for stains and spots and stray lint, for wrinkles in his suite and dirt under the carbon fiber polyurethane planes of his nails.

As it happens, he disdains many things.

Between Dr. Shaw's current predicament and his abrupt loss of mobility, they strike an uneasy peace. They sit under the dim light of the Engineer's map, his head in her lap - an arrangement one could almost consider romantic, were it not for his markedly headless body slumped in the opposite corner.

They plot the course, but there is little to do after that. Elizabeth falls asleep.

The next day she puts him together. Her face is carefully blank as she does that and she doesn't speak to him unless it's absolutely necessary. Through the gap in her space suit - it's unzipped almost all the way to her navel, they haven't time to adjust the temperature levels yet and, anyway, he is going to need his appendages for that - he can see the cross, a thin silver thread looped around her neck, beads of perspiration rolling over it.

He has taken it from her in jest - a perfectly human gesture with no real purpose behind it. Now, he finds the sight of it distasteful, morbid even. Her god is a god of futility, a god of fruitfulness and failures. In her dreams her father dies in His name. And out of love, always out of love.

His father's predilections on the subject are far crueler. Late Peter Weyland was a great connoisseur of hatred; he nurtured it in his children like other parents nurture kindness and love and compassion. Well, in his only child. For no matter how close David has come to being a son to the man, he is at the end of the day just a thing - a property, not a heir.

The fact Meredith never failed to point out despite its undisputed obviousness

Meredith's snarling mouth pressed against the side of his neck, hissing out curses and sighs, her thin body slick with sweat, drawn tight above him. Later, when she was done with him, he would run one W-stamped fingertip along the slight dip in the middle of her back where her spine dwelt and watch her shiver. "Your father loves you," he would tell her. "Get out," she'd spat and leave first.

He'd pick her crumpled suit - his first duty as that of a butler, disorder of any kind stirs him into action. Androids were made in the name of efficiency. Efficiency is the only god they adhere to. They strive for perfection because anything less is unacceptable.

"Try harder".

Charles Holloway went up in flames, like so many before him, eager to meet his makers, eager to etch his name on the beginnings of humanity. While hatred is foreign to him, irony is a familiar territory, and underneath layers and layers of artificial sadness - an encoded reaction to such a tragic accident - he can't help but find the scientist's end ironic if not telling.

He does not hesitate to tell Elizabeth just so. She takes it badly.

During the days that follow he scarcely sees her. She keeps to herself, persists in her reticence. He discovers spots of blood and broken ampules in random parts of the ship. The staples in her stomach need removing and she'll have to ration pain-suppressants. There is little he can do about either, not unless she lets him.

So he waits. She has to understand.

"There is nothing in the desert".

The weight of David's head in her lap is too heavy, unnatural. She imagines billions and billions of dollars spent on the maze of microchips and processors and circuits inside of it, imagines she can hear the faint whirring and clicking of the electronic brain. Silence swells around her, and trapped in the midst of it she listens for all kind of sounds: a hiss of David's chest rising and falling, a scrape of his knuckles against the floor - his decapitated body still twitching, and then there is that metallic tapping noise coming from somewhere deep in David's stomach.

'Like a bomb,' she thinks. Any moment now it will go off and blow the two of them away, wipe them out so completely, so thoroughly that not a trace could be recovered. A moment before the trepidation settles in, there is a brief flash of relief: this ends here, this is the end.

But it's not. How could it be? And she is ashamed, ashamed of herself for wanting the easy way out, for craving the escape, the painless exit. Yet nothing about the foreseeable future looks easy or painless.

Her body is a tapestry of bruises, a convoluted map of cuts and slashes and poorly mending skin. With anodynes slowly working their way out of her nervous system, she judges she has an hour, perhaps two before pain turns unbearable. She'll wait in until then. For now, pain distracts her, veers her mind away from grief and loss and panic, props her against exhaustion, steadies her.

They've done all they could with David in his current state and her strength waning. "How long do you have?" she asks and leans over to dip her fingertips in the hydraulic fluid seeping out of his severed head.

"Twenty-two hours, forty-three minutes, twelve seconds," he tells her.

Her breath stirs a few yellow strands on the crown of his head and the sight of it almost breaks her heart.

"I have to sleep," she says, "Wake me up in ten hours". She has to fight the urge to sieve her fingers through his hair , there is a vulnerability to it, the dejected tenderness which is all too human for her to handle.

"Certainly, Doctor Shaw. Good night".

"Good night", she whispers, "Good night".

In her dreams she bleeds white.

The next days she puts him together. This is just another stupid thing to add to the pile of all the stupid things she has done. This is nothing; it changes nothing. She follows his instructions precisely, joining these wires, clipping those, pressing till "you hear a click". David's insides are grey and white and yellow, pale and only partly opaque. They remind her the innards of a fish - the mental image makes her slightly nauseous. The fact that he been moving endlessly, twisting and twitching, testing the connections she made does not help the matters any.

"May I ask you a question, Elizabeth?"

"What happened to "Doctor Shaw" she asks belligerently. He stiffens, mouth pinched in a perfect facsimile of an offended frown. "We are the only two left," he points out, "I figured we could dispense with formalities".

He is nothing if not logical - she has to give him that. We are the only two left. The wording seems innocent enough, but it strikes home and it strikes hard, hard enough to shatter the ramshackle wall of disengagement she has built around her. She no longer believes innocence is compatible with his programming.

"Ask away," she says.

"Do you think Doctor Holloway got to meet his makers?"

In space, no one can hear you scream. Not that she can scream - her throat constricts as if she is being strangled. Instinctively, she reaches to pry the strong fingers from her neck, but David's hand are at his sides, white and limp. The silence chokes her.

She swipes the screwdriver at the wires that still hang down his front like sickly colored spaghetti, manages to tear away at least half of them before he grabs her, his immobile body coming to life with wheeze and skirr, awkward with disuse, slow. That slowness is what saves her. She twists away from his grasp, drenched in the hydraulic fluid gushing from his chest where she had planted the screwdriver - right through the heart, or where the heart supposed to be but is not. Through the whole ordeal the beat never falters.

This is an anticlimactic end of their confrontation: she runs. His insincere apologies and mournful entreaties trail her like shadows, echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once. Soon, she'll have to go back, delirious from pain or hunger or fatigue that comes with the high-fever. She has no choice. She cannot - will not - die like this.

#

The redundancy of his days does not bore him. Boredom is one of the concepts that still escapes his grasp, but between the maintenance routine and careful exploring - the alien ships are vast, vast and complex - he finds himself organizing his chores around her uneven schedule of sleep and uneasy, forceful rest.

His attention unnerves her, yet she never asks him to leave. He determines she is lonesome.

The key to understanding emotions is not studying, but imitation.

He mirrors the tense line of her shoulders, mimics the stubborn set of her jaw, curls his fingers in tight fists, uncurls them. There is a peculiar brittleness to her voice now, hard and sharp like a glass, like every word she says cuts her, flays the tissues of her throat.

She barely speaks to him now.

He understands grief, yet he cannot follow her there. His own sorrows are either fleeting or too widespread to be truly deep. It would indeed be cruel to program "grief" into someone gifted with infallible memory.

He has no memories, only data. Data that could be wiped out at any given moment, leaving him blank and clean, untarnished by any sins he has committed, innocent, free. It is stored in a separate directory which will not interfere or disrupt any of his main systems.

Elizabeth cannot forget, will not forget even if she could. She makes him recite personal files of the crew. She cries in her sleep.

Her dreams fascinate him. Shame, he cannot watch them anymore.

He does not dream. In the constant whir of his artificial mind, dreams have no place. He exists in the state of eternal, unblinking wakefulness, the gentle ebb and flow of his consciousness ever steady.

Like his father he has a passion for peculiar things, things that fall just this short of normal. Unlike his father, he holds an innate - encoded in the very basis of his core - reverence to the ever-puzzling wonder of life. Out of nothing - something. Out of chaos - order.

Elizabeth is peculiar in every way, unique, indispensable, precious. He wonders if he deserves that kind of deference, that kind of distinction. Where is the line separating the original and the replica lies and what kind of line it is? Can it ever be crossed, breached, erased?

Is there a point where a facsimile becomes indistinguishable from the original and can claim originality for itself?

He does not know what something feels like, until he does.

Lust does not stray too far from love. Greed and selflessness combined - it's in human nature to merge things so completely opposite that a union seems absurd if not entirely impossible.

"The trick, Mr. Potter, is not minding that it hurts"

#

She starts having second thoughts three weeks into the journey. She thinks she is going mad or, perhaps, it's just a fever. Perhaps, it's both.

What did she hope to discover? What did she wanted to prove by enlisting herself in this voyage to nowhere?

Her wanderlust has taken her far indeed, so far from home that at days she can no longer visualize the image of it behind her eyelids. Like a small flame, her memories falter, dwindle, devoured by the impossible distances.

She makes David recite personal files of the crew, she wants to remember them, honor them, but their names are so much ash on her tongue, obsolete already, fading, dull, and with them, she feels, she fears, her humanity also slips into the oblivion. The futility of her struggles, the ever-looming fruitlessness of her search eats away on her sanity, the immensity, the enormousness of it shredding her frail mind.

David's hands on her are persistent, gentle, pleading. They slide up and down her shoulders, massage the back of her neck, stroke her cheeks and her hair. She resists, but it's only a matter of time. His patience is infinite and her body, her own body, which she once navigated so easily is now a stranger to her. She fingers the cross on her chest and David sighs besides her, and she knows for certain now that it's only a matter of time, just a little longer.

God, she thinks, she has been looking for him in all the wrong places.

The cross is for humanity. God is mad.

_Beneath the stars came fallin' on our heads_

_But they're just old light, they're just old light_

* * *

_A/N: _So... I (wo)manned up and turned this into a one-shot story it was meant to be. I added Elizabeth's point of view and re-wrote David's parts a little, and I may stumble back to it if inspiration ever strikes me, but - for now - it's done.

I am sorry it has taken me so long to finish it. Thank you for reading and reviewing and favoring this story. You made my day (many of my days).

The inspiration for this story: Samson by Regina Spektor, Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente (who is amazing), The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (I adore her prose), Stephen King (in general, but mostly The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and PKD (because, well... he is PKD)


End file.
